Celebrate 'My Sinatra' on Father’s Day

Wednesday

Jun 14, 2017 at 9:00 AM

By Ed Symkus, Correspondent

Cary Hoffman does not look like Frank Sinatra. But he sure sounds like him, from the voice to the intonation to the phrasing. Sinatra’s not around to do concerts anymore. But if you check out “My Sinatra” – Hoffman’s tribute to the man and his music, with a few stories about himself thrown in – at the Wilbur in Boston on June 18, just close your eyes, and there’s a good chance you’ll believe Ol’ Blue Eyes is in the house.

Hoffman, 77, has had a number of successful show biz careers: producer, manager, comedy club owner, jingle writer among them. But he’s been obsessed with Sinatra since he was a kid.

“I loved male crooning,” he said. “That was possibly the result of me losing my father in a car crash when I was 7. It might be that a soothing male voice is what drew me in as a young kid. But there was always music in the house. After the car crash, my mother and I moved into my uncles’ apartment, and I heard the beautiful notes of my Uncle Charlie, who played the trombone, and my Uncle Joe, who played the flute, and my Uncle Hymie, who played the trumpet.”

Those uncles were studio musicians, and they played, either on record or in concert, with Sinatra. So there were plenty of Sinatra albums at the apartment.

“I started singing along to them, note for note, phrasing for phrasing,” said Hoffman. “I was 12 years old. This was right before my bar mitzvah, and I crooned my haftorah at the bar mitzvah and got the only standing ovation that anyone ever gave a kid in the Kew Gardens Hills Jewish Center.”

There were dreams of singing for a living. He was making the rounds of Greenwich Village, learning the ropes, when Bernie Travis, a standup comic, told him he had a beautiful voice but he didn’t know what he was singing about.

“That’s one of the things about Sinatra,” said Hoffman. “He always knew what he was singing about. He was able to transform the songs into personal statements about his life, about our lives. He always said that he would read the lyrics before he learned the music, and he would recite them as a poem. I learned how important it was to do that, because his feelings about those great songs is what grabbed us.”

But Hoffman never got beyond the Catskill Mountains circuit, finally coming to grips with the fact that he could sing like Sinatra, but he couldn’t be Sinatra. A move to the West Coast got him into writing songs and jingles and even a part in the cult film “Tunnel Vision.”

“How did you know about that?” he asked, incredulously, then said, “I was in LA in the ’70s, and the singing was over. My friend Neil Israel cowrote a parody of television called ‘Tunnel Vision,’ and asked me if I wanted to do my Sinatra in it. I said OK, and showed up. But he had omitted one little fact. His idea was that in the future, crooners would be cannibalized by an audience. So he had me onstage, he told the audience of 75 people that when I start to sing they should rush me. But he didn’t tell me that. And it happens in the film.”

It was 20 years later that Hoffman had a chance meeting with swing band leader Stan Rubin in a New York jazz club called The Red Blazer. Hoffman ended up onstage performing “Night and Day,” and that signaled his return to singing Sinatra. He’s been doing it ever since.

“I just did songs at first,” he said. “Then I started to write. I wanted people to know Sinatra’s story and my story. PBS came down to film it (‘My Sinatra: The Songs and the Stories’ was broadcast in 2003), then I continued to write it and it became kind of a musical play. I took that and modified it into what I’ll be doing at the Wilbur.”

Hoffman will sing about 20 songs, accompanied by 11 musicians playing the original arrangements of Nelson Riddle and Billy May.

“Part of the show is the story of me and of Sinatra,” said Hoffman. “I compare and contrast. So while Frank Sinatra is at his height, after his comeback, having hit after hit, my cantor and rabbi are screaming at me to stop crooning in the synagogue. In 1956, Sinatra is singing 'I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ and is pining away for Ava Gardner, and I’m pining for Sharon Rosenblatt.”

“I do sing a lot in it, and I know there are some people at the shows who would love to have me shut up and just sing straight through. But I did a concert a number of years ago in Muncie, Indiana. And at the end of one song, someone yelled out, ‘When did you first realize that you could sing like Sinatra?’ That’s about when I started to amplify the story, because the audience wanted to know more. So I’m very fortunate to have a dream come true that started so many years ago.”

Cary Hoffman performs “My Sinatra” at the Wilbur in Boston on June 18 at 2 p.m. Tickets: $32-$65. Info: 617-248-9700.

Upcoming concerts and club dates

June 17:

Jazz pianist and songstress Diana Krall will play some selections from her new album “Turn Up the Quiet” at the Shubert Theatre in Boston. (8 p.m.)